Of course they’re lying. They always do.

Jon Carroll
| on October 1, 2015

I was thinking the other day about Edward Snowden. Remember him? He was quite the rage in 2014. Traitor or patriot? Everyone wanted to know. Also: Will his girlfriend be able to join him in Moscow? People wanted to know that too. There’s no political story so technical that a little sex won’t spice it up.

Also: Didn’t he trade up a little? He’s, what, a five, and his girlfriend is clearly an eight. These are important foreign policy concerns. They help us understand and blah. The public’s right to know! That’s what’s important.

Snowden’s revelations made it clear that the government has been lying to us about domestic surveillance for just ever. Democratic administration, Republican administration, lies lies lies. And yet, most of the interest was in the cops-and-robbers part of the story. Once it was clear that Snowden was going to stay in Russia: bye-bye front page.

And why should that be true? Because we know that institutions are going to lie to us. They are going to cover stuff up, even though the cover-up is almost inevitably worse than the crime. Or at any rate: More stupid than the crime.

Of course, some cover-ups work. We’ll never know which ones they are, but I’m sure there are examples floating about various high-level bureaucracies. Do it this way, it works. But then something happens. Whistle-blowers plus a free press are the most effective antidotes to organizational malfeasance.

Providing always that people care. Snowden’s revelations have been all but forgotten. No one is really checking to see whether, say, the FISA courts are somewhat less kangaroo-y than previously. How will we even know without another whistle-blower? And meantime, Americans (particularly Muslim Americans) have to go through all sorts of unimaginable crap just to lead ordinary undisturbed lives.

But people have long since become inured. Of course the government is lying to us. In fact, pretty much everybody is lying to us. They want us carefully narcotized so the Big Lie gets subsumed by, say, the pennant race. And I love the pennant race, but I do get the uneasy feeling that if I knew more about government spying and less about Hunter Pence, I might be doing a better job of citizenship.

The news was crammed this week with instances of public lying. High-ranking generals sought to manipulate the media so its concussion scandal (mandatory boxing for cadets at West Point leads to brain injuries, study says) got limited publicity, including the idea (floated, then abandoned) that there really wasn’t a scandal going on at all.

And then there’s the Toys R Us thing. The company hired an outsourcing company, and pretty soon people from India were showing up at the company’s main office and shadowing employees there, mostly in the accounting office. They were literally observing their work keystroke by keystroke.

Later, that analysis was sent to India, where still more people were trained to be Toys R Us accountants. And eventually the American accountants were fired so the entire department could be shifted to India, because it’s cheaper in India.

Plus, the folks from India who did the shadowing were all in this country on H-1B visas, which were designed to help American companies keep jobs in the United States. Which, obviously, this didn’t do.

Now, I dunno much about global economics. It may be that these tactics are necessary to keep the toy business running, although candidly I don’t think so — I think it’s about putting more money on the bottom line so shareholders can continue to approve the current directors, resulting in more money for them. Is that cynical? Call it, rather, “realistic.”

But instead of defending itself in the marketplace of ideas, Toy R Us threatened its employees with grave sanctions if they ever said a word to anybody. But of course they did, and now Toys R Us will hire the best media spinners that money can buy to tell us why their lying wasn’t lying, technically, per se, and all that.

Because we’ll forget. We won’t even be interested when we learn that it’s a widespread industry practice. We won’t feel any kind of solidarity with the laid-off workers. And we’ll forget because we’re utterly unsurprised when organizations lie to us. We’re all in this same dreary boat together, and I can’t feel sorry for you because my turn will come soon enough.

Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders — anything to take away that feeling of powerlessness. Everybody lies, so we have no data to depend on. I'm pretty sure Trump lies — about his wealth, among other things — and Sanders. ... Who could be cynical about Grandpa Hate Wall Street? Well, me, maybe.

Unfortunately, despair just plays into their hands. If every battle seems unwinnable, why fight at all? Here, have a muffin.